“They confronted all the problems common to that stage of life, including conducting courtships, acquiring property, and engaging in premarital negotiations.”
In the book, published by Princeton University Press, Norton reproduces dozens of the queries (lightly edited for clarity to modern eyes) and divides them into six topics including choosing a spouse, matrimony, and “dangerous liaisons”—meaning those outside wedlock.
Emotion-Savvy Parenting
Alissa Worly Jerud ’08
“Your kids are at the center of your world and you love them more than anything,” Jerud writes in her intro. “At the same time, being with them can be unimaginably taxing and sometimes downright infuriating.”
Jerud is a clinical psychologist and a clinical assistant professor at Penn; she’s also a mom who has struggled with how best to react when her kids are a handful.
Her self-help book offers (in the words of the subtitle) a “shame-free guide to navigating emotional storms and deepening connection.”
As the former Arts & Sciences psychology major writes, although parents typically focus on how to change their kids’ behavior, it’s inevitable that children will push their parents’ buttons—so it’s healthier and more useful for the adults to adopt coping mechanisms that help them be less reactive.
The Necromantic State
Irina Troconis
Troconis, an assistant professor of Romance studies, is a native of Venezuela. Her scholarly book was inspired by trips to her home country in the 2010s, after the death of Hugo Chávez—the revolutionary leader turned authoritarian president who ruled the nation for 14 years.
As she noted during her visits, images of Chávez remained ubiquitous—as though his ghostly eyes were still observing the populace.
“They were everywhere,” Troconis says in an interview in the Cornell Chronicle.
“On buildings, on T-shirts, on billboards, on posters, on earrings, on keychains, and on necklaces. And yet, the people I saw going about their day did not seem disturbed by them. In fact, they barely paid any attention to them.”
In the book, Troconis examines how Chávez’s “specter” has lingered in the country’s public, private, and digital spaces.
Tragic Resistance
Megan Shea, PhD ’09
A doctoral alum in theater arts, Shea is on the clinical faculty at NYU. In her first book, she (in the words of the publisher, Routledge) “analyzes playwrights, directors, and performers who shatter gender norms to gain agency within the patriarchal institutions restricting them.”
The scholarly book includes chapters on such topics as a 20th-century adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; the 1996 Suzan-Lori Parks play Venus, which explores the sexualization of Black women; and the tragic story of Anna Nicole Smith as interpreted by comedian Margaret Cho.
The book, the publisher says, “examines the nature of these performances to interrogate how theatrical and performative resistance works and why performance might be a vehicle for altering patriarchal structures that withhold agency from women and trans/genderqueer+ people.”
